Step 1 - Transaction flow in TK4

KICKS for TSO, meaning TurnKey 4 version of MVS3.8J is an user application what tries to emulate a real CICS region. In for example z/OS or z/VSE the region is a user running the CICS application, and all others can use that users CICS region.

In TK4 however there is no such way, and we have the possibility to run seperate for each user a version of the KICKS program. So each instance is running in its own address space, and does not know of the others.

We can however share VSAM files, or other types but VSAM is the most convenient to use in KICKS, thus creating a multi user system. Think about record locking!

Installing KICKS can be done on user level, or system level, and I suggest you do that so its easier to maintain.

KICKS itself relies on compiled assembler and COBOL programs. I did not looked into GCC because I cannot stand the language. So COBOL it is.

Assembler is used to compile the tables where the to be used programs are defined, the screens (BMS maps) and datafiles.

This is a security feature, only datasets who are made known to KICKS are usable. Thus no on the fly dataset connections, everything is been predetermined.

That brings us to the KICKS CLIST where you normally start the KICKS program with.

Only the datasets (think VSAM clusters) you are going to use must be ALLOCATED in the CLIST. They also must be FREEed after usage.

Above you can see a section of the CLIST where the VSAM clusters (or files) are allocated.

This is a must do, otherwise your transaction is never able to use the clusters.

So when the CLIST is started, allocation is done, KICKS will load, and loads in the compiled FCT, PPT and PCT tables in where we defined the resources we will use, often a map, a datafile and a program.

The table definitions can be found in hlq..KICKSSYS.V1R5M0.INSTLIB where hlq is the High Level Qualifier where you installed KICKS subsystems.

We will venture into those tables in a following blog post.

The user is presented with a welcome screen, the default KSGM transaction, what shows you a logo and a copyright message if you want to read or print it. This can be changed as you can see on top of this post.

After clearing the screen with the CLEAR key (often you need to define a combo on your terminal emulator, do it, because its needed a lot in KICKS) a new transaction code name can be entered.

KICKS will search the tables if it exists, and starts the transaction, if not an ABEND (Abnormal End) code will appear.

The KSSF transaction gracefully terminates the KICKS session, the CLIST continues, FREE's the datasets and brings you back to TSO after termination.